


Partial Disclosure

by RetroactiveCon



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Autistic Cisco Ramon, Past Hartley Rathaway/Eobard Thawne | Harrison Wells, Trans Cisco Ramon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-07
Updated: 2019-12-07
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:33:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21654565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RetroactiveCon/pseuds/RetroactiveCon
Summary: “Tell me, did you take as much satisfaction as everyone else in Central City when I was disowned?”Cisco looks offended. “Why would I? Some kid getting turned out on the streets for who he is—that cut close to home. Why would I have been pleased?”Hartley tilts his head. He knew Cisco had family troubles, but he’s never heard details. Until now, he’s never thought to ask. “Close to home?”
Comments: 7
Kudos: 69





	Partial Disclosure

It’s approaching the fourth hour of their stakeout, and a heated debate about Hogwarts houses has ended in a stalemate. (Hartley contends that the houses are not inherently bad or good. Cisco admits Gryffindors have the potential for reckless violence but refuses to concede that Slytherins’ cunning might be beneficial.) 

“If you tell anyone that we spent two hours arguing about Harry Potter, I will end you.” Hartley jabs a finger in Cisco’s direction. 

“Man, everyone knows you’re a nerd. You can give it up already.” Cisco sweeps a hand through his hair. He’s let it curl recently, a development of which Hartley quietly approves. (He is by no means attracted to Cisco. He’s just slightly envious of his hair.) “Although I gotta admit, it begs the question, why did you snub my shirt on my first day?” 

“It was unprofessional.” Hartley isn’t about to admit that he’d been cruel to Cisco out of jealousy. Save Barry, he hasn’t told anyone on Team Flash about his relationship with faux-Wells, and he doubts they’ve guessed. “My first day at STAR Labs, I was living on the streets and I managed to show up in a shirt and tie.” They’d been acquired in ways he’s too proud to admit, but he’d given them such a thorough hand-washing that he doubts anyone at STAR Labs had noticed. 

“Yeah, well, not all of us came from a wealthy—wait, out on the streets?” 

Hartley sighs. “Yes, and no, I wasn’t allowed to take what I pleased from my parents’ house before I left. I took a backpack—that was it.” 

“Man.” Cisco shakes his head. “That got conveniently left out of…”

“What, the tabloids?” Hartley scoffs. At the time, it had seemed like the end of the world—not just disowned but publicly proclaimed as a failure to his parents. Had the tabloid reporters caught up to him, the news that he was living on the streets would have been plastered across Central City. “Tell me, did you take as much satisfaction as everyone else in Central City when I was disowned?” 

Cisco looks offended. “Why would I? Some kid getting turned out on the streets for who he is—that cut close to home. Why would I have been pleased?” 

Hartley tilts his head. He knew Cisco had family troubles, but he’s never heard details. Until now, he’s never thought to ask. “Close to home?”

“Do you know Dante—my older brother?” When Hartley shakes his head, Cisco nods. “Good. That’s good. Well, uh, five minutes with him and you’d get it.” 

“You were thrown out?” 

Cisco laughs without humor. “Nope. I just had to live with my parents and my brother telling me I was ‘imagining things’ and that they ‘still loved their little girl’ if I would just realize it was all in my head.” He winds a curl around his finger. “You can understand why I left as soon as I could.” 

Hartley reaches out a hesitant hand. He seldom touches anyone except Barry, but he’s seen often enough how much Cisco likes to be touched. At the last second, he pulls back. “I’m sorry.”

Cisco shrugs. “So, basically, maybe think before you get all prickly? I don’t hate you, man. Maybe I used to, but you’re kinda growing on me—like a really bad case of acne or a fungal infection.”

Hartley snorts. “The feeling is mutual. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry for the way I treated you on your first day.” 

“Eh. It was kinda classist and definitely rude, but it wasn’t transphobic, so that was nice.” He adjusts the air conditioning. Discreetly, Hartley aims another air vent at him. It’s only partly out of kindness. He would also prefer not to freeze, which he most certainly will if the airflow isn’t redirected at Cisco. 

“Did anyone at STAR Labs know? I certainly didn’t.”

“Wells did. Uh, evil Wells.” Cisco narrows his eyes when he corrects himself. “I hadn’t changed my name, so I had to apply under my dead name, so he kinda had to know. And I told Caitlin after a little while. She might have told Ronnie—I told her I didn’t care if she did. Other than that, I don’t think so.” 

“Have you told Barry?” 

He shakes his head. “It never came up. He might know? It’s kinda hard to tell what he notices and what he doesn’t.”

That’s true: for as distractible as he often is, Barry can be both observant and intuitive. The things he observes are not always the most obvious or relevant details, however, so it’s hard to guess what he might have noticed. Hartley nods to show he’s heard, then returns to an earlier comment. “Did faux-Wells ever hold that information against you?”

“What, you mean like blackmail me?” Cisco sounds as though the notion is absurd. “No! Anyway, I’d have shut him down if he tried. I really don’t care who knows, so, y’know, I would’ve been all ‘Go ahead’ and I think that would’ve been that.” He leans back in his seat and tucks his hands behind his head. “Why, did he blackmail you? Is that why you hated him so much?”

“No.” Hartley hadn’t expected Cisco to say he had. Faux-Wells was too subtle to stoop to something so crass. “Did you have feelings for him?”

“Evil Wells?” Cisco yelps. “No! He was like my father, if my father was white and not transphobic and had a really soothing voice…okay, y’know, maybe I had a tiny crush on him? Like, _tiny?”_ He holds up his hand, the forefinger and thumb a few millimeters apart. “But mostly I was just so pleased to have a mentor who didn’t act like I was deluded or stupid or mock me for my interests, I wasn’t gonna mess that up. Plus, I’m pretty sure like ninety percent of STAR Labs had a little bit of a crush on him.” His eyes widen. “That’s why you hated me so much! You were jealous!”

Hartley nods. He’d thought this revelation might disgust Cisco, but it only seems to amuse him. He lays both hands on the wheel and stares out into the dusk, muttering under his breath, “Oh man, you were _jealous._ What did you think, Wells was gonna fall head over heels for some nerd barely out of college?”

“It wouldn’t have been unprecedented.” Hartley slips his right hand out of its gauntlet and fiddles with the settings. The last meta they faced could summon and throw large chunks of stone, so he’d had his gauntlets set to a frequency that would shatter the chunks to dust. This meta is nowhere near as destructive, so he doesn’t need such a forceful frequency. 

“Evil Wells falling for some nerd barely out of college?” Cisco scoffs. “He didn’t seem like…” His joking tone fades. When he says, “Oh,” he’s solemn. 

“I was eighteen, stupid, and starstruck.” The toggle to change the intensity is jammed. Hartley yanks on it with more force than is, perhaps, strictly necessary. “With significant emphasis on ‘stupid.’ I thought he loved me, which should have been my first clue.” 

In retrospect, it seems absurdly obvious: Hartley had been, and remains, nothing special. Now, knowing faux-Wells’ identity, it’s a reasonable guess that he’d sought Hartley out based on his reputation in the future. He wonders how that reputation changed after his work on the doomed accelerator. Perhaps it more accurately reflects the good-for-nothing boy whose intelligence is the only thing of value he can offer.

Cisco wrinkles his nose. “So, wait…you tried to kill him…because he dumped you?”

“No!” Hartley’s head snaps up and he glares. “You know I warned him about the particle accelerator explosion, and he fired me immediately. If he had only done that, I would have been angry—maybe not enough to kill him, but enough to want some kind of revenge. No, rather than leave it at that, he decided he couldn’t risk me speaking out, so he locked me away. I spent close to three months in that hidden room under STAR Labs.”

“The one where he kept Eddie,” Cisco realizes. “That’s how you knew where to find him.” The memory of that room must return to him in full, because he breathes, “Oh man.” 

Given enough time, Cisco will no doubt draw something close to the correct conclusions. Hartley hurries to change the subject. “Knowing what I do now, I’m surprised he didn’t kill me.”

“Yeah.” Cisco flattens a hand over his chest. “So am I.” 

They sit in bizarrely companionable silence. Hartley measures time by the beat of Cisco’s heart, a slow steady thud like the sound of a bodhrán. After the thirty-fifth beat, he ventures, “I’m glad they sent us out together.”

“Yeah.” Cisco offers him a lopsided smile. “You’re not that bad when you decide not to be a prickly jerk.” 

“And you’re far less annoying than my original estimate.” 

It’s at this precise moment that the van rocks violently starboard. Hartley yelps, Cisco curses, and their pleasant respite comes to a screeching halt.

“I think we found our meta!” Cisco pronounces. 

“Oh,” Hartley snaps, “you think?!” 

After twenty minutes, a sonic blast, an unintended energy discharge that Cisco is utterly and alarmingly unable to replicate, and a collision with a poorly-placed tree, they capture their meta. On the way back to STAR Labs, Hartley decides that he could get used to this.


End file.
